Friday, December 26, 2008

A demolition derby—full of monster trucks, scrap cars, and even a giant Godzilla—filmed with tilt-shift photography, then put together in a time-lapse video.

If you wonder how something so gigantic and destructive could look so tiny and harmless, the answer is a combination of techniques. One is the use of time-lapse, which makes you lose frames and gives motion a jerking quality that helps fooling the brain into thinking that you are watching miniatures. Another one is the angle, which makes you think that you are seeing something from above, like you would see a model on a table. Increasing the contrast, to obtain harder shadows, also helps in the deception.